Her Vigilante Passion

by Her Vigilante Passion (lit)

  Lara licked her lips, tasting the remnants of Luke’s cum. “Still jealous?” She cocked a brow and let herself fall over Adam, catching her weight with her hands on either side of his head.

  He chuckled, the sound like music to her ears. “Only because he got to come.”

  “No one’s stopping you.” She used her newfound position to gain a bit of control, pushing against his hold until she managed to lift her body off his dick. She wriggled her hips, drawing another low laugh from him. Then she let her body fall once more, impaling her drenching pussy with his thick length.

  Adam threw his head back, his eyes closing as an animalistic growl rumbled from his chest. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” His eyes opened to narrow slits. “You know I can’t hold out when you do things like that.”

  Lara nodded and repeated the movement despite the tightening grip of his hands on her hips. “I know.” She also knew he wouldn’t allow himself release until she came again. Not that it would take much more than another deep thrust and she would be right there with him.

  She’d started to say as much when she felt a hand glide over her ass. A moan festered in her throat at the combination of the gentle touch to her rear and the wide, stiff cock spreading her womb. The moan turned to a quickly indrawn gasp when a finger slipped between her ass cheeks and grazed over her forbidden entrance.

  Trepidation snaked through Lara even as a sliver of icy heat connected from her anus to her pussy. Her eyes widened, and she grew still. All thought of riding Adam’s dick that last few thrusts to oblivion vanished in the frightening, pleasure-filled idea of having that fissure of her body explored.

  A keen knowledge moved over Adam’s face even as a small smile kicked up the corner of his lips. His grip on her eased. It seemed he knew such a hold on her became unnecessary now with Luke’s teasing perusal of her secret passage. Adam tickled the backs of his fingers up and down her side, his gaze never wavering from hers.

  “He means to take you there.” Adam’s words came as softly as his touch. “Likely while I take you here.” His hand traveled down, disappearing in her pubic hair to find her swollen clit. His pelvis lifted off the ground to propel his dick deeper still inside her clutching channel.

  “Would you like that?” Luke asked. “Would you like to feel my cock inside you here, Lara?” The tip of his finger eased past the tight band of muscles rimming her anus.

  “O–oh.” Lara’s arms started to shake as her body attempted to decipher pain from pleasure.

  “Would you like your body filled to bursting with my cock and Adam’s?” Luke’s other hand caressed her butt cheek, his finger wiggling slightly in her nether hole. She felt it stretching, the muscles relaxing ever so slightly to his probing touch. “Maybe I’ll blister this pretty ass of yours first, give you that proper spanking I promised you, before we show you such pleasure.”

  “Yes.” Lara hissed the word as a second orgasm crested. The intense sensation of Luke’s digit in her ass, the mere implication of his impressively thick cock serving as a replacement proved to be enough to send her quaking over the edge yet again.

  Both men seemed to sense her bliss because Adam pistoned his dick inside her convulsing channel at the same time that Luke worked his finger deeper inside her anus. The combination wrenched a mewling cry from Lara. She never heard herself make such a sound, never felt anything close to the riot of ecstasy that ruled her. She collapsed on top of Adam, jerking, her inner muscles milking Adam’s dick until she felt his hot seed spill into her. Lightheaded with pleasure, Lara passed out.

  * * * *

  “He won’t do anything you don’t want. You know that, don’t you?” Adam held out a hand for Lara as she waded back out of the pond. She had been drenched with her own juices and his after their lovemaking and needed another washing before putting on her dress.

  “Of course I know that.” Heat crept into Lara’s cheeks as she put her hand in Adam’s. She looked away, unable to meet his gaze. The probability ranked high that exactly how badly she wanted everything Luke promised her and more might be etched in her eyes. She started walking back to where they left Luke beneath the tree at the edge of the clearing.

  Adam laughed, reaching to hook a finger beneath her chin. “Then do you know how much I truly enjoy seeing you blush? It is a treat you rarely gave me before Luke’s return.”

  “Is that what made you jealous?” Lara stopped and turned to him. “That Luke can make me blush while you rarely do?”

  “It might be part of it. It might be more that I feared you would decide you wanted only him.”

  Lara gaped at him. Her gaze danced over his face, realizing from his expression that he meant exactly what he said. “Adam,” she began, but couldn’t think of a thing else to say.

  “He got it right, Lara. I had you to myself since he rode out of town. It’s been just the two of us for a long time. How am I to know you don’t wish for that same amount of time to be with Luke?”

  “You know because I’m telling you.” Lara rose to her tiptoes and brushed her lips to Adam’s. “I do want that time with Luke. I want the rest of my life with him the same as I want it with you.” She threw back her head and expelled a loud gasp. “What you can’t know is how lucky I am, how amazing I feel knowing I won’t be forced to choose. I’ve loved you my whole life, both of you. I thought I lost him, Adam.”

  “We both did.”

  Lara nodded. “But we didn’t. He’s back, and he’s staying. It might take both of us to keep him here. That’s what your ma said. You’ve got to help me see that he stays.”

  “He’ll stay.” Conviction turned Adam’s tone to stone. He averted his gaze, focusing on a point over her shoulder. On Luke she figured, given that she stood with her back to Luke and the tree beneath which he sat. “He’s different now, Lara. He’s not the same man that got on his horse that night outside the saloon.”

  Lara kept her hand locked in Adam’s as she turned slightly to catch view of Luke. Her heart stumbled. The burning that previously settled in her cheeks made a flaming path straight to her pussy. No, he was certainly not the man who’d left her. The Luke who returned to her possessed a hardened resolve that radiated from every pore. Even now, lying on his side with one leg bent at the knee, the other stretched on the grass and his cock soft and dangling against his thigh, he looked like a man who no one in his right mind would approach.

  “We’re not the same people he left behind either,” she reminded Adam. How could any of them be the same after that horrid night?

  “We don’t know what he went through, where he’s been.”

  “Does it matter?” She shot a look at Adam, caught the intensity in his eyes, and sighed. “Of course it matters.”

  “Not in the ways of changing anything, but it haunts him.”

  “It haunts all three of us.”

  “It will turn him harder. It will make him more crazed if it continues to fester, Lara.”

  She heeded the warning in Adam’s tone as she watched Luke pluck a blade of grass and stick it in his mouth. His brow winged up, his jaw muscle working as he chewed. “He will never be as gentle as you. It’s not his way. He looks for justice, for…” She stopped abruptly, fear chilling her veins.

  “Redemption?” Adam finished for her.

  Lara whirled to face Adam. “He can’t be. Surely you don’t think he will put himself in harm’s way, let himself be gunned down because of what he did to Jeb.”

  “No, that would be suicide. Luke is no more a coward than he is a murderer.”

  Lara sighed in relief. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right. I don’t know what I’m thinking.” He wouldn’t have returned for her to see him shot down. He’d returned to protect her, to protect his family and the people of his town.

  A cool breeze ruffled the trees, and Adam hooked an arm around her waist, pulling her close. “Come on. You’re going to catch a chill standing out in the open, naked this way.”

  Lara beamed a smile at him.
“Not if you and your brother do your duty and keep me warm. You did say the job fell to you to keep me pleasured, right?”

  Adam muttered an oath, but he grinned as she led him toward Luke. Lara folded herself to the ground in front of Luke. Desire sparked in his eyes as he watched her. It ignited the ever-smoldering fire within her. One corner of his lips tilted in a smile. He tossed the blade of grass aside and reached for her, yanking her against the hard wall of his chest.

  “All clean?” He nipped her chin and then traced the outline of her lips with his tongue.

  “We are.” Lara drove her hands into his hair, loving the feel of the silken strands. “Aren’t you going to wash up?”

  “Don’t need to. You cleaned me nice and good with this fantastic mouth of yours.”

  Her cheeks flamed, and she swore she heard Adam chuckle as he settled on the ground at her back. Blindly, she reached back for him, finding his arm and guiding it around her waist just below Luke’s arm. Her other hand came to rest on Luke’s chest, and she pushed herself away from him enough to meet his gaze.

  “What’s going to happen in town? What are you planning to do when the Desert Riders reach Wildwood?”

  Luke’s expression went from playful to serious in a flash. “I don’t intend on them making it to town.”

  “How do you plan to stop them?” Adam asked, folding his body over Lara’s back to lean over her shoulder.

  “Set up a blockade about a mile outside of town.” Luke pushed himself up, but his hold on Lara didn’t move from her waist. “I’m going back before dark. I’ll stay in town tonight with the gang. I haven’t run this by them yet, but I figure we can form a line at Miller’s Pond.”

  “You don’t expect they’ll come in quietly, sneak in from another direction?” Adam sounded skeptical.

  Luke shook his head. “Bastards are too arrogant for that. They will ride straight in.”

  “And you will be there to see they don’t make it all the way,” Lara concluded, already picturing his intentions in her mind’s eye.

  Luke nodded. “That’s right, pretty girl. Miller’s Pond is as open as it gets between here and the next town over. If the gang sets up stakes there, we’ll be able to spot the whole of them long before they can do any damage.”

  “Except to you,” Lara pointed out, the fear returning with enough intensity to raise goose pimples on her flesh.

  “There are plenty of places to take up watch if you know the area. I want everyone situated so I know where they are. I want my gang where I can spot them. There will be less chance of a surprise that way.” His voice dropped almost to a whisper.

  Lara swallowed. She could all but feel his pain radiating from his chest and seeping into her palm. She understood what he didn’t say, why he needed his men to stay in his sight. He didn’t want one of them sneaking up at his back the way Jeb did.

  “We never talked about what happened,” she told Luke unnecessarily. Adam’s arm squeezed her waist, offering her both encouragement and comfort. She desperately needed both right now. “Will you talk about it now?”

  Luke stared at her, his eyes wrought with so many emotions she didn’t dare attempt to sort them out. After a long, tense moment, he expelled a loud sigh and nodded. “I suppose we probably should.”

  * * * *

  Luke covered Lara’s hand on his chest and gave it a squeeze before taking it away. He shifted, turning to rest his back against the tree. The move put a few inches of distance between himself and Lara and even more between himself and Adam. He needed that space despite the growing cold that now consumed the air around him. Amazing how the weight of a memory, the guilt of an action, could turn the world to ice even on a warm, sunny day.

  It had been warm that night, too. He remembered it so very clearly, stalking into the saloon to find the bastard believed to have robbed, raped, and murdered EllieMay Sue Rossly. He even felt the sweat beading on his brows the same as it did that night.

  “What that son of a bitch O’Keefe did to the Rosslys is unspeakable.” Luke swiped the back of his hand over his brows, only marginally surprised when his hand came back wet with true sweat. “When I realized where he went, when I found him standing at the bar in your pa’s saloon knocking back a belt of whisky as if nothing happened, God, Lara, you can’t possibly know what went through my mind.”

  Lara inched closer, but she didn’t touch him. “I can if you tell me.” Her tone and eyes implored him to continue. The love he felt radiating from her nearness gave him strength.

  He looked at her. He saw his woman as she sat now a few inches away. He saw her, too, as he did that night and every night since. The way she’d walked toward the outlaw at the bar, oblivious of the atrocities the man had committed or his likely intent to do the same to her still sent chills racing down his spine. “O’Keefe meant to rob the saloon.” Luke felt certain of it clean through his bones that night. His instincts had never steered him wrong before. He never believed they did then either.

  “You reckoned he figured to bide his time, hold up in the saloon while the town started a man hunt for the Rossly family’s assailants,” Adam guessed.

  Luke nodded. “I expect he thought he might get away, could get another robbery off, get his—” cock satisfied by raping Lara, too.

  He abruptly cut off his words, but when he dared a glance at Lara, he saw he hadn’t stopped talking soon enough. “While everyone in town focused their search elsewhere,” he said instead.

  “What made you look for him at the saloon?” Lara asked. “The rest of the gang and the townsfolk they enlisted to help concentrated on the lands closer to the Rossly’s spread. Why did you come back to town?”

  To make sure you were safe.

  “Instinct.” Both answers were true enough, though he spoke only the second. Even now, years later, he remembered the turmoil he battled that night. His duty as the leader of the only semblance of law in Wildwood at that time demanded his loyalty. His needs as a man to see his woman protected shouted above all else. His mayhem ended in an instant when he realized his instinct led him to Lara because at least one of the O’Keefe’s comrades wasn’t far behind.

  “I always said you had that by the wagon load,” Adam muttered.

  Luke saw in his brother's eyes that Adam knew what Luke left unsaid as well.

  “He drew on you,” Lara said of the outlaw. “I saw his hand go for his gun just as I cleared the corner of the bar. I remember.” She stopped, closing her eyes as if she saw it all happening again in her mind’s eye. Luke knew she likely did for he saw it all every time he’d blinked for the last two years. “You said something. I don’t remember what, but it got his attention, and he knew you meant to take him in.”

  What Luke said in that moment remained a blur to him, too. It got lost somewhere in the pounding of his pulse, drowned in a soul-deep fear he’d never felt before that night. “I saw him go for his gun, too.”

  “You didn’t give him a chance to draw,” Lara said. “You already held your gun in your hand, and you shot him.”

  “I’m sorry you saw that.” Luke wanted to reach for her, but held himself back. Not yet. He couldn’t allow himself the total comfort of her contact just yet. So much more remained to be said. They only now reached the part of the night he wished more than his next breath that he could’ve prevented her from seeing.

  “I’m not.” Lara shook her head vehemently. “He got what he deserved.”

  “Jeb walked in. The moment I fired, he stepped into the saloon behind me.” A part of Luke knew the timing to be exact. Amid the sound of the shot, he somehow heard Jeb’s booted feet on the wood at his back. “I didn’t tell Jeb I meant to head for the saloon. I left him with the others back at the Rossly’s place.”

  “You put him in charge of the search.” Adam’s tone made his words more statement than question. He hadn't wanted to lead the gang, preferring to let Jeb act as second in his place. “He’d never gone against your orders before. You didn’t know he would
pick that night to be the first.”

  “I didn’t think, fuck, I should have realized he would go for you and your pa too, no matter what order I gave him.” Luke held Lara’s gaze for only a second before he looked away. He couldn’t handle the memories while he stared into her hazel eyes. “It was plain stupid of me not to realize he would want to see you safe, same as I did.”

  “The moment didn’t give you time to think, Luke. That’s just it.” Lara scooted closer again until her leg brushed his, but still she didn’t touch him. “It happened so fast you could do nothing more than react.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be Jeb behind me.” Luke squeezed his eyes shut over the burn of pain still so raw even after all this time. “I heard him. Somehow a part of my mind registered his presence behind me, and I spun. By the time I realized it was Jeb and not one of the other outlaws, I’d already pulled the trigger.” He actually remembered seeing the bullet fly through the air to embed itself into Jeb’s heart. He never thought it possible to see such a thing, but he didn’t doubt his memory of that moment. The projectile spun in the air on a direct course for Jeb’s chest, and Luke had known a paralyzing certainty he never dreamed. He’d known he shot down a friend. The shock of the impact in Jeb’s expression would haunt Luke’s soul for the rest of his life.

  Luke opened his eyes and gave his head a shake to rid himself of the visions. “What I did to Jeb, to you, is unforgivable. I couldn’t stay after that, Lara. I couldn’t face you, let alone ask you to exonerate me for murdering your brother. I shouldn’t do it now.”